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A Note About This Playtest

We'll be releasing the chapters for playtest piecemeal. That's because they are in various draft stages, and some of them still need cleaning up, integration of playtest feedback, and so on. We'll be posting Game Mechanics today. Expect to see the Making Characters chapter next week, which includes character generation, skills, morphs, and traits. The Psi rules summary and Action and Combat shouldn't be far behind those. Mesh and Gear will take a bit longer.

How open to "radical" alterations are the developers in regards to feedback and brainstorming? There are a few interesting suggestions in the various threads that I think are interesting ideas, but if they're already past the line of acceptable changes, it my be more in my interest to focus on smaller tweaks.

If the rules are early and in potential flux, then wild brainstorm tangents might improve the game. If the rules are "near done" and you're mainly looking for missed small bits and oddly worded statements, that implies such tangents are wasted effort to some degree.

How open to "radical" alterations are the developers in regards to feedback and brainstorming? There are a few interesting suggestions in the various threads that I think are interesting ideas, but if they're already past the line of acceptable changes, it my be more in my interest to focus on smaller tweaks.

If the rules are early and in potential flux, then wild brainstorm tangents might improve the game. If the rules are "near done" and you're mainly looking for missed small bits and oddly worded statements, that implies such tangents are wasted effort to some degree.

I'm pretty curious about this too — some of the tweaks that I've suggested in other threads are fairly simple (movement/action economy tweaks); others are skill-tweaking/attribute balancing type stuff; and others still are significant "What if SOM was a morph-only stat and skills mapped to COO as an ego aptitude" type zaniness.

I've gone through a couple rounds of chargen, and will be gaming out a few sessions soon with my group, so it's not all speculative, but I don't want to waste everyone's time spitballing stuff that's super-out-of-scope for 2ed…

Yes and no. Sourcebooks such as Sunward, Rimward, Gatecrashing, Panopticon, and Firewall are 95% compatible. Some of the morphs, gear, and other rules provided in their Game Information sections will be outdated, but are easily convertible. Any sample characters will also need to be converted. Our first-edition adventures and X-Risks are less compatible, but shouldn’t take too much adjustment to use with second edition. Transhuman and the Morph Recognition Guide are not compatible with second edition—but material from each of them inspired and was integrated into second edition.

How open to "radical" alterations are the developers in regards to feedback and brainstorming? There are a few interesting suggestions in the various threads that I think are interesting ideas, but if they're already past the line of acceptable changes, it my be more in my interest to focus on smaller tweaks.

If the rules are early and in potential flux, then wild brainstorm tangents might improve the game. If the rules are "near done" and you're mainly looking for missed small bits and oddly worded statements, that implies such tangents are wasted effort to some degree.

We're in an in-between stage. We have a lot nailed down, but there is a lot we are still open to changing. The drafts are in various stages of completion, ranging from "done except for playtest changes" to "detailed notes/outline with a lot of the text currently being assembled." We are pretty unlikely to change any of the core dice mechanics or to steer away from the new pools at this point. However there are plenty of others things, especially smaller details/rules, that we are flexible on.

As an example, we are currently discussing in-house whether to collapse Academics/Interest/Profession skills into a single Knowledge field skill. This was something that was nominally on the table before, but we kept them separate because those field skills are already open-ended and too nebulous for some people so having them codified into 3 distinct categories was helpful. We've seen some playtest feedback that is pushing towards combining them, though.

We will be posting some specific questions and rules issues we are looking for feedback on with the next playtest pack update.

IMO, the combat and gear chapters can't really be separated very well. I wouldn't be surprised if both of them released at once, and that was the reason why we're waiting.

It'd be really hard to evaluate the effects of changes to weapons or armor without knowing the combat rules, or vice versa. That said, there's a lot of gear you don't use in a fight, and those should stand alone pretty well.

No that was a joke. There was a Antifa rally where I live, protesting against a "Freedom Prayer" rally lead by some white supremacists. The Antifa group was easily 5 times the size of the original rally. The police got involved, rubber bullets, tear gas, and people were detained including reporters. A couple of my friends were involved. I honestly don't even know what part of the world Rob lives in. Just figured it might be something the staff might enjoy being at...and possibly be involved in. Annnnyways.

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~Alpha Fork Initialized.
P.S. I often post from my phone as I travel extensively for work. Please forgive typos and grammar issues.

No that was a joke. There was a Antifa rally where I live, protesting against a "Freedom Prayer" rally lead by some white supremacists. The Antifa group was easily 5 times the size of the original rally. The police got involved, rubber bullets, tear gas, and people were detained including reporters. A couple of my friends were involved. I honestly don't even know what part of the world Rob lives in. Just figured it might be something the staff might enjoy being at...and possibly be involved in. Annnnyways.

Adam's wrapping up layout on the latest playtest stuff, should have it up later tonight.

You'll be getting: Combat, Psi, and Acquiring Gear/Morphs, along with updated Game Mechanics and Making Characters. Though Gear and Mesh are still being worked on, this should be enough to actually get a game going. I'll post a change log later.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

IMO, the combat and gear chapters can't really be separated very well. I wouldn't be surprised if both of them released at once, and that was the reason why we're waiting.

It'd be really hard to evaluate the effects of changes to weapons or armor without knowing the combat rules, or vice versa. That said, there's a lot of gear you don't use in a fight, and those should stand alone pretty well.

In our effort to keep relevant material together, weapons stats are now included with weapon rules.

No that was a joke. There was a Antifa rally where I live, protesting against a "Freedom Prayer" rally lead by some white supremacists. The Antifa group was easily 5 times the size of the original rally. The police got involved, rubber bullets, tear gas, and people were detained including reporters. A couple of my friends were involved. I honestly don't even know what part of the world Rob lives in. Just figured it might be something the staff might enjoy being at...and possibly be involved in. Annnnyways.

Ok good. Antifa makes me ashamed to be an anarchist.

It wouldn't be that much of a stretch, I've been involved with antifa groups of one sort of another for most of my life. But that's not a discussion we'll be having here :)

Adam's wrapping up layout on the latest playtest stuff, should have it up later tonight.

You'll be getting: Combat, Psi, and Acquiring Gear/Morphs, along with updated Game Mechanics and Making Characters. Though Gear and Mesh are still being worked on, this should be enough to actually get a game going. I'll post a change log later.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

IMO, the combat and gear chapters can't really be separated very well. I wouldn't be surprised if both of them released at once, and that was the reason why we're waiting.

It'd be really hard to evaluate the effects of changes to weapons or armor without knowing the combat rules, or vice versa. That said, there's a lot of gear you don't use in a fight, and those should stand alone pretty well.

In our effort to keep relevant material together, weapons stats are now included with weapon rules.

Thank you all for this. My group will surely appreciate it. I know I do.

—

~Alpha Fork Initialized.
P.S. I often post from my phone as I travel extensively for work. Please forgive typos and grammar issues.

Adam's wrapping up layout on the latest playtest stuff, should have it up later tonight.

You'll be getting: Combat, Psi, and Acquiring Gear/Morphs, along with updated Game Mechanics and Making Characters. Though Gear and Mesh are still being worked on, this should be enough to actually get a game going. I'll post a change log later.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

IMO, the combat and gear chapters can't really be separated very well. I wouldn't be surprised if both of them released at once, and that was the reason why we're waiting.

It'd be really hard to evaluate the effects of changes to weapons or armor without knowing the combat rules, or vice versa. That said, there's a lot of gear you don't use in a fight, and those should stand alone pretty well.

In our effort to keep relevant material together, weapons stats are now included with weapon rules.

I'm super excited about this, I'm hoping I can do a real playtest in about a week so this is really good timing for me!

This is a little bit nit-picky, but would it be possible to get working bookmarks on the playtest documents? Most of the documents don't have bookmarks, and those that do have garbled ones.

I have software that lets me automatically make them from text formats, but it's not foolproof (and the formatting in the documents is not perfectly coherent), and since it's not CC licensed I'm the only person with accurate bookmarks.

I can't promise that will get done for the current batch of files but I'll make sure the next batch, at the least, is better bookmarked. (There's some "fun" adhoc stuff going on in the creation of these docs...)

I just want to note that I largely like what I see, and think that consolidating skills, providing more guidance in chargen, and having morphs adjust pools instead of recalculating skills, and some streamlining of the gear system, are all good calls and 2E is on the whole moving in a good direction!

I also have a lot of little gripes with 2nd ed as currently written, though, which I've noted in each chapter discussion.

The quality of the actual rules in the playtest documents are encouraging. It implies to me that work is in fact happening and we're going to get a good product. If it has to wait until 2018, so be it.

Everything is fine. If we see the core book in September or October it's not the end of the world. Besides I'd rather have a Beta or Alpha artless/fluffless copy of the full rules before it's finalized. I've ran 3 games of EP 2 playtest and found the published rules solid so far. I am waiting for the new mesh and equipment material to come out to issue a full review. I am also looking for social rules, hopefully expanded well beyond what EP1 had and more than what we've seen in the playtest.

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~Alpha Fork Initialized.
P.S. I often post from my phone as I travel extensively for work. Please forgive typos and grammar issues.